I wasn’t sure that I’d ever willfully return to a full-time journalism gig after I parted ways with 1105 Government Information Group.  I had been lured away from what at the time had been a burgeoning freelance career to run Defense Systems magazine, only to be cast out as part of a staff purge at 1105 13 months later, and I was pretty sure that the right editorial job wouldn’t ever come along.  So, I went back to the precarious life, and aside from some rather insane hours and juggling a host of projects (some, that in retrospect, were quixotic at best), things have been okay.

Then I got a call out of the blue: was I interested in running a Federal government technology newsletter?

So, after a few weeks of discussion, I’ve made the decision to return to a full-time job covering the Federal market. But this time, it’s different.  Mostly, that’s because the company that came calling is Mark Bisnow’s outfit, his eponymous almost-always-B2B newsletter company. Also, I’ll be putting out a daily, hopefully with the assistance of a reporter to be named later.

The approach of Bisnow’s FedTech newsletter is to cram a lot of information into a small package, leavening it with a look at the people who make up the Fed technology community.  That means reaching out–a lot–to the community.   As a former Navy officer and former government contractor,  and someone who’s covered the government sector on and off for over 20 years now as a journalist, it’s a great deal for me–I get to talk to people I’ve always had a great deal of admiration and respect for (even if it didn’t always seem that way while I was writing The Packet Rat column for GCN).

So, once more into the breach, and all that.  I’m looking forward to a long, wild ride.